Two paths to creativity

Not just any ad: If you think about it, most ads are pretty useless, right? Sure, they might be informative or funny, but those things aside ‘what have ads ever done for us?’ So the IBM people set about creating ads which would also have a functional aspect. Starting with a flat surface with the company logo on it, they found that by tweaking the shape, they could turn the ad into a shelter for people to take cover under, or a bench for someone to rest on, or perhaps a handy ramp in places like airports or train stations, for people with heavy luggage or people on wheelchairs. And then, they did something else – they invited people to contribute as well – ‘What is your smart idea?’ Watch the clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPXpdM6cCTo&t=10s

Creativity templates: Can we teach creativity – or at least give it a boost? To many people, this just does not make sense; for them, creativity means simply letting people free to come up with whatever they like in the hope that this is going to be original. Trying to teach creativity would imply some constraints. Some researchers in Israel wanted to test whether this was indeed so (Goldenberg et al, 1999).

Creativity and advertising are closely related, so the team started by collecting as many of the top advertisements as they could find. They ended up with 200 of them – all of which had won some kind of award. While studying these ads, the researchers discovered something interesting; about nine out of ten of them (89%) fell into one of six basic templates.

1. The Pictorial Analogy

The pictorial analogy works by producing an arresting image that takes a familiar image and gives it a surprising twist, which demonstrates a consumer need or product benefit.

2. Extreme Situation

This approach presents an unusual and unrealistic situation to emphasise a product benefit. Again the focus is on a powerful image.

3. Extreme Consequences

Similar to the Extreme Situation, except here we make the mental leap to explore the implications of using, or not using a product.

4. The Competition

The classic direct comparison of two products to showcase definitive superiority.

5. The Interactive Experiment

The idea of getting people to physically interact with your ad in the print environment provides unparalleled engagement and recall.

6. Dimensionality Alteration

The rarest of the six templates, it alters the dimensions of the product (e.g. multiplying it and seeing what happens; or by dividing it into components and mapping the consequences) or it alters time to go into the future or the past.

The next step would be to see whether this discovery could help people become more creative.

So the researchers got together three groups of people and asked each of them to work together to produce three ads – one for a shampoo, one for a diet food item and one for a sneaker. The first group were left to their own devices; the second were given instruction on brainstorming techniques, while the last group were taught the six basic templates.

The final set of advertisements was evaluated by an independent creative director. The results were clear: the ads produced by the last group were judged to be both more creative and to generate more positive attitudes towards the product.

Applications: Can we use this idea in class? Indeed we can. According to Heath & Heath (2008: 64) the hallmark of creativity is that it violates people’s expectations. So we can give students some ordinary tasks and ask them to ‘tweak’ them. Here are some examples:

• Stories: One of the easiest ways to do this is by taking traditional, well-known stories and turning the good characters into bad ones and vice-versa. Or what about a fairy tale like Cinderella set in the modern world? (I did this in class once and Cinderella ended up going to the ball in leather clothes riding a Harley Davidson!)
• Imaginative ads: Similarly, we can have students writing ads for crazy, non-existent products (e.g. a device for changing traffic lights from red to green [Hadfield & Hadfield, 1990 – Game 24]) or ads for ‘situations vacant’ (e.g. a firm of Bank Robbers asking for someone to join the team [ibid – Game 2].
• Register shift: For more advanced students, we can have them come up with dialogues and then change the register from formal into informal and vice-versa. For instance, imagine light banter in a court of law or the effect of someone using extremely formal language in an everyday situation. For a great example of the latter, watch this clip from Fawlty Towers on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOUE97fQ-AE

In all of these cases I have found it helps enormously if students are given a concrete example so they can get the concept; then they can be astonishingly creative.

The deep root of creativity: Think of a winged horse – it is something unusual, but if you think about it, the idea simply combines elements from well-known creatures. According to Leslie (2014: 170) essentially all our novel ideas are in fact recombinations of old ones. And there is research to support this.

Researchers Uzzi et al (2013) decided to look at a field they knew well – scientific articles. Their database consisted of nearly 18 million of them. The researchers needed to come up with a way for assessing the originality of the papers. Clearly, if a paper looked at the ideas of Einstein and Newton, that would not be so unusual; change Newton to Wittgenstein and things look different. So this was one element.

The other thing was to see how effective this idea was. Here the researchers used frequency of citation. If your paper is among the top 5% most frequently cited studies, then clearly you must be saying something pretty original.

So the researchers came up with an algorithm to evaluate the originality of the papers in their database. All 18 million of them. Their main finding was fascinating in its simplicity: the best papers combined previously known ideas in new, unusual ways. Put bluntly ‘A lot of people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen’ (Uzzi – in Duhigg, 2016: 215). Think of Paxton’s Crystal Palace – essentially a greenhouse!

Applications: The basic idea here is that the more our students know and the more diverse this knowledge is, the more likely they are to have the raw material to come up with their own original combinations. But what goes for our students also applies to us! Here are two activities which I have found both contain a creative element and lead to lots of discussion:

• ‘What’s on your card’?: (Stefanovic, 2011: 26) Imagine you are preparing a business card with a difference. Under your name, you have to include a title/trait which you think sets you apart and shows what you can contribute to the group. For instance, mine would be ‘Hunter/Gatherer’ – because I actively hunt for new ideas and collect them.
• ‘Go find it’: (ibid: 79) In this activity, you simply ask students to go out and come back with one thing which they believe would help the class in some way. When Stefanovic tried this with some marketing people, someone actually went out and got someone from the street – a random individual who actually met all the characteristics of their target group.

What do these two ideas share in common? The answer is that they come from a different field. Stefanovic’s book is meant for business people and yet I believe they would work equally well for us. So think about some field you are familiar with: are there any insights/activities that would be useful to us in ELT?

One last creative idea: Confess: if I were to ask you what ‘catted’ (adj) means, you would be stumped, right? Rory Sutherland was intrigued by the fact that while we do use ‘dogged’ as an adjective (meaning ‘energetic and dumb’) we have neglected to come up with ‘catted’ (meaning perhaps ‘lazy and devious’) – and he added that he would love to be accused of displaying ‘catted determination’ (Sutherland, 2019: 255). And of course, once we have the idea, why should we stop there? I have often used the activity ‘Coin a New Word’ with my students and they simply love it! Nor does one have to restrict oneself to adjectives; from acronyms to compound words, playing with language is a sure way to freshify and deroutinise your lessons.

References

Duhigg C (2016) Smarter, Faster, Better. London: William Heinemann.

Goldenberg J, Mazursky D, Sorin S (1999) The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads. Marketing Science 18 (3) 333–351.

Hadfield C & Hadfield J (1990) Writing Games. Edinburgh: Nelson.

Leslie I (2014) Curious. London, Quercus Publishing.

Stefanovich A (2011) Look at More. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sutherland R (2019) Alchemy. London: WH Allen.

Uzzi B, Mukherjee S, Stringer M, Jones B (2013) Atypical combinations and scientific impact. Science 342 (6157) 468–472.

The Six Creative Templates You Need to Know: (https://bit.ly/39r5MlT)

YouTube: ‘Ads for ELT – Creativity’ (https://bit.ly/3dJw0Dy)

YouTube: ‘Faulty Towers – Televisual Feast’ (https://bit.ly/2yehzaj)